First of all I have no idea whats going on with this board and Sun. So I wont comment that.

Convincing sony to support at VM. I bet they will only bow down to one argument and thats money. If the customers demands certain (java) games on their boxes Sony will move. That brings me back to my original "Less talk more games " argument.

Concinving mainstream industry, sure. But I am sure you agree that THIS thread by K.I.L.E.R is a flame thread and wont accomplish anything. Especially looking at the level of argumentation presented at the other board. Also arguments like this is best presented with a good case. What cases do we have. What major succeses have been done in Java yet. Yet again I am back at the motto "less talk more games".

I also see that you have some, "opinions" about institutes of higher learning. Well I was refreering to many of my fellow students who mostely share the opinion that java is not good enough. I spend hour debating this in our cafeteria.

The professors on the other hand, knows (and have proven) that a VM can in theory run as fast as native code, and they continue to advocate that to the students. Also a major part of the institue is researching in VM optimizations.

I suppose VM has gotten the bad reputation due to it mostely being used in applets and the fact that the commercial VM has been, and are far from the theoretical performance.

If you continue to ignore the fact that great games are only one small part of the process of convincing people then you are no smarter than the C++ programmers who believe Java is "too slow": you are living in a world where you believe things are how you think they are irrespective of the evidence around you .

Up until the late 80's, the ONLY choice for commercial games was Assembler. Then Dungeon Master was written (1987?) the first commercial game written in C (I could be wrong on the exact title, but Im fairly sure it was DM) We then had around 10 years of games in C, until C++ started showing its benefits and now we all use that.

Maybe overly simplistic, but to a large extent the people you have to convince are programmers & technical directors (stubborn bunch, the lot of em ), and the first reaction will always be 'Show me'. A commercial game written entirely in Java will open a lot more doors than any amount of publicity. Renderware gained its popularity largely through 1 (big) game - GTA III.

Its the work of the marketing to get the first big gig - from there, a visibly succesful title will sway more industry hearts than any amount of press releases, etc.

- Dom

-----------------------------Names may have been changed to either protect the innocent or because I've forgotten them

A commercial game written entirely in Java will open a lot more doors than any amount of publicity. Renderware gained its popularity largely through 1 (big) game - GTA III.

A great example - Renderware was HUGE way before GTA3 was on the drawing board.

Just because games *players* hadn't necessarily heard of them didn't mean much, since they don't sell games.

Off the top of my head, Criterion already had 200 employees by the time GTA3 launched...they were doing extremely well because they had a great pitch: we save you 50% development time and you aren't tied to one platform - when your publisher says "we've changed our minds, this will now be released on Xbox instead of PS1" instead of going bankrupt you shrug and make a few small changes (that's a synopsis of their sales talk, and I make NO claim it's accurate - they have good sales people ).

(FYI Criterion is the company that develops RenderWare; historically, they don't do anything else, so Criterion == RW)

They were on the way to being big, but were not anywhere near their position now. The first 'eye opener' was Pro Evolution Soccer (which I don't expect many Americans would be interested in), but it wasn't until GTA III came out that the big studios took it seriously.

I would guess that prior to this, some games that didn't do so well may have layed some of the blame in post-mortem on the technology (always tempting!), and this increases distrust. With the runaway success of GTA III, the publishers then take the attitude of 'well if they could do it...' etc. as the technology has been 'proved' in the marketplace.

Whether the players have heard of it means nothing. The big publishers want to see a million-selling game written with the technology before they will take it seriously - i.e. signing games using it - hence GTA III as the example. Before GTA III we had only a couple of titles using Renderware - both in external studios. A year past GTA III coming out and nearly all new projects were considering Renderware during prototyping.

However - I have to stand in the middle on this debate. A great game only works as the final piece in the puzzle. With maybe 1 in 100 games making it really big, your gonna have to get up to 100 games into the market to achieve this - and thats the task of marketing & raising awareness.

They were on the way to being big, but were not anywhere near their position now.

They were doing pretty damned well at trade shows during 2001, when some of the ex-Hybrid guys cornered me to show off their DPVS system (that had recently been swallowed by RW).

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A year past GTA III coming out and nearly all new projects were considering Renderware during prototyping.

My understanding was that that had more to do with the timing of the re-explosion of the console market - when Sega died, and Microsoft were barely a drop in the ocean, and PS2 hadn't hit it's prime, the demand for cross-platform 3d engines was not so great. Certainly, by 2001 RW already had more than one hundred of the biggest names in the games industry as licensees - I know because we talked to them about selling Grex Games to them, and so we did our research on who their customers were back then.

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However - I have to stand in the middle on this debate. A great game only works as the final piece in the puzzle. With maybe 1 in 100 games making it really big, your gonna have to get up to 100 games into the market to achieve this - and thats the task of marketing & raising awareness.

Yeah, irrespective of my pedantic quibbling over CS/RW , that's my point: that it's not merely about writing a great game. Much, much more is needed.

Only way we can convince people of othervise, is to make great games and great programs. Sitting around and talking each others ears off in a JAVA forum sponsored by SUN. Will never convince anyone.

Frankly, that's a bit of a naive comment. I don't think anyone here is just 'sitting around'. Many of us are working in the biz (games or Java) and this forum is (at least in my opinion) more than just a place to discuss Java games dev. It's a place for like minded people to discuss things of interest to them, let off steam and so on.

One wonders why you're sitting here talking when you should be out making 'great games'?

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